how to trigger compaction with borg 1.1.x

[ThomasWaldmann]

one can do the following locally on the repo server:

borg with-lock REPO true

that will lead to compact_segments() being invoked IF one uses borg 1.1.x (due to an implementation detail).

instead of "true" one could also invoke any other command.

using with-lock has these advantages:

• it does not need the encryption key, so it can be used on the repo server
• it does not use the cache, thus it does no time-consuming cache-resync when invoked from a different machine than the machine usually doing its backups into that repo.

[hexagonrecursion]

https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/1.2.0b3/usage/notes.html#separate-compaction claims that borg<1.2.0 auto-compacts the segment files at end of each repository-writing command. Under what conditions would manually triggering compaction in borg 1.1.x be desirable?

P.S. Relevant 1.2.0 documentation for the benefit of readers other then me and ThomasWaldmann: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/1.2.0b3/usage/compact.html

[ThomasWaldmann]

Hmm, iirc there was some user asking this, but i don't remember WHY.

[fantasya-pbem]

I am wondering what to do with this. Create a new FAQ how to trigger compaction for the 1.1.x docs? Or we could backport the "separate compaction" article to 1.1.x, stating that this is a feature of 1.2 and compaction can be triggered in 1.1.x by doing this trick.

[ThomasWaldmann]

I don't think we need to extend the docs. The usual way is to just write to the repo with borg 1.1.x and it will implicitly compact at the end of this (as it ever did, nothing new here, even if the borg server is running borg 1.2.x already).

[ThomasWaldmann]

(the docs label here is rather meant as "this issue documents something")